Day 21: Cartoon Yorkie

Day 22: Book Pile

Day 8: Hot tea and cosy knits

This is an idea I’ve had in my head for a while, and since fall has really made an entrance this past week I decided to finally realise my idea. It’s time to bring out the hot tea and cosy knits! This might be one of my favourite drawings I’ve done for Inktober yet.

Day 10: Uterus

My Monday was devoted to doctor’s appointments about my uterus and ovaries, so I did an anatomical drawing of an uterus and ovaries for day 10. It depicts the uterus, fallopian tubes and ovarian follicles. I think it turned out quite cool.

Day 11: Angel

I was just going to do a quick, simple angel, I told myself. Then I kept adding details and working on it. It looks like a complete picture and I’m pleased with my line work. I watched a video by Alphonso Dunn on how to ink clouds and it turned out really well. They also helped to picture feel more balanced.

Day 12: Well from the cemetery

As I said, I’ve wanted to revisit the well from this sketch. Since I still had the reference picture on my phone, I re-did it and I think it turned out much better this time around. I wish I hadn’t done the tree to the left, though, and instead had drawn in some more clouds.

Day 13: Hedwig

I’ve wanted to draw a picture of Hedwig from Harry Potter since forever, so I figured Inktober might be a kick in the butt I needed to get it done. I used some Japanese ink I have for the background and, while I don’t think it’s visible, I coloured her eye yellow using promarker.

Day 14: Rabbit

One of my mates from the Urban Sketchers tipped me off about Alphonso Dunn’s tutorials on YouTube, so I’ve been watching a couple of them. I wanted to try out drawing some texture with ink and decided on fur for this fat little rabbit. It turned out rather well… for a while.

While I love Inktober, I kind of miss colours. So I went ahead and ruined my hard work by adding colours to the drawing. And my scanner hates green, I’ve come to realise.

Last April, I landed myself in the ICU after what was probably a bad reaction to medication. As they treated me, they also took an MRI and discovered a cyst in my pituitary gland. Over the year it grew at a rather alarming rate, so it was surgically removed in December 2015.

My therapist suggested that I do some drawing to try and deal with what happened. This is the first one I’ve done.

Originally, I wanted this to be an ink pen sketch. But while I could tell what it was supposed to depict, I doubted that others could see it and when I asked people it was confirmed. So I decided to use ProMarkers to colour it, producing a neat comic book-feel which I really like.

This is my arm during my first SYNACTHEN-test in August. Crash course in pituitary gland function: it’s sometimes referred to as the master gland due to its control over a lot of our hormones. One hormone under its control is ACTH, which sends a signal to the adrenal glands to produce cortisol. During a SYNACTHEN-test, synthetic ACTH is injected and the medical personnel then draw blood to test the level of cortisol. If your body responds properly to the stimulation, you’re not suffering from adrenal insufficiency. Mine didn’t respond as it should have.

Basically this is a picture of the time I got my diagnosis of secondary adrenal insufficiency confirmed, which sucks. I don’t know if it’s due to the personal significance, but I feel that this is quite the scary image.